Legal Commentary

How To Fix the Gmail Notifier Unavailable Bug

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

I’ve been using Gmail notifier for some time. It’s not that I particularly want to know when I get gmail, since I have that forward to my main account anyway. No, the great thing about gmail notifier is that I can set it to make Gmail the default email program for “mailto” links on web pages.

But a while ago I started getting error messages from the notifier; I didn’t mind not having the unread mail count, but there’s something about error messages at boot up that makes me grumpy.

An error has occurred.
Cannot connect to your mailbox.
Service temporarily unavailable.

Except it seemed permanent.

So I was happy to find out that the problem was because I forced gmail to use https, and that there’s info on a patch:

If you’ve tried the new https setting and are using the Gmail Notifier, you’ve probably noticed a conflict between them by now. Good news for Windows users - we have a small download available that will set the Notifier to use https. Here’s the instructions:

1. Download http://www.google.com/mail/help/downloads/notifier_https.zip
2. Open up the folder.
3. Double-click on the file called notifier_https.reg to install it.
4. Click ‘yes’ when you’re asked to confirm if you want to add the information to the registry.
5. Restart the Notifier.

And you’re done! The Notifier will now work with Gmail set to always use https. If you decide you don’t want to use that setting anymore, you’ll need to install the other file in the zip folder - notifier_https_undo.reg - to reset Notifier.

And it works!

Full post as published by Discourse.net on August 24, 2009 (boomark / email).